High Definition DVD

duff · #1 05-01-2003, 04:40 PM

So I was scrolling through Yahoo and found that there is a High-Definition 'T2' DVD. *
I thought all DVDs had the inherent advantage of being HD-ready for display on an HDTV or the like. *What's the difference?

Clint DeBoer · #2 05-01-2003, 08:36 PM

It's not really the HD-DVD spec (at least, not yet), but it's a Windows Media Player 9 file that uses a low-bitrate high-definition codec to playback the file.

Basically, if you have a good HTPC, you can playback the file, route it out the video card's HDD-15 port to your RGB input-ready HDTV, route the digital audio output to your receiver, *and blammo...

It will be interesting to see if it works on my LCD projector... The specs for the HTPC look high, so I'm not sure it will decompress on mine (900MHz Athlon processor + GeForce4MX card)

A good article on this T2 DVD release is here:

http://dvd.ign.com/articles/393/393023p1.html

[Edit: Forgot to answer your initial question...]

DVDs aren't made for HDTV monitors, rather they are often anamorphic, allowing them to display all of their encoded information in widescreen monitors/TVs. Ultimately, a DVD is still 720x480 pixels encoded at a maximum of ~8 Mbit/sec (average bitrates are usually around 4.5-5.0 Mbit/sec)